Pirate Bay Is Infringing Copyright, European Court of Justice Rules (theguardian.com)

The European court of justice (ECJ) has ruled that BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay is directly infringing copyright, in a move that could lead to ISPs and governments blocking access to other torrent sites across Europe. From a report: The ruling comes after a seven-year legal battle, which has seen the site, founded in Sweden in 2003, blocked and seized, its offices raided, and its three founders fined and jailed. At the heart of the case is the Pirate Bay's argument that, unlike the previous generation piracy sites like Napster, it doesn't host infringing files, nor link to them. Instead, it hosts "trackers," files which tell users of individual BitTorrent apps which other BitTorrent users to link to in order to download large files -- in the Pirate Bay's case, usually, but not exclusively, copyrighted material.

Comments

Re:Land of the free, home of the Brave

[dugancent]

Wrong continent.

Re:Killing of the messenger

[ljw1004]

This is now a precedent.

If you have *instructions* in your possession to lead you to copyright infringement, you are guilty of infringement.

Do we have other examples?

That's a wildly incorrect interpretation of the ruling. Read the judgment: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/d...

1. European law says that an author has a "right of communication to the public".
2. This case was precisely about the definition of "communication to the public".
3. It has to involve an "act of communication" and a "public".
4. An "act of communication" (according to prior case law) includes just offering links to your users. However it specifically doesn't include (according to statute) situations when you merely provide facilities that let users communicate between each other.
5. The operators of the Pirate Bay did provide links, and they did a lot more than "merely provide facilities that let users communicate with each other": they also provided a search service, provided a classification service, they themselves checked to ensure that copyright material had been placed in the appropriate category, they themselves deleted non-functioning links, and they actively filter content. Therefore they were making an act of communciation.

Your example of "instructions in your possession" fail the two tests that were the sole focus of this judgment: they are not an act of communication, and they're available to the public.

Re:Reasoning

[phantomfive]

Common carrier is a US concept, not a European concept.

That said, this wasn't a question of whether you are 100% accurate or not in your filtering. It's a question of what the intentions were. The court here found that the Pirate Bay was telling people to come get protected works. TPB did not manage to make a convincing argument otherwise.

Re:Economic Victory

[Tom]

But that won't work for billion-dollar film budgets. Movies in particular remain a sticking point.

Copyright infringement is a problem, sure. However, even with all the torrent sites, movie budgets have been constantly increasing, and profits are great (if you ignore the Hollywood account that makes the most successful movies lose money on paper).

Hollywood is doing great. The focus on the AAA movies is completely misguided. We should turn our eyes to the smaller movies, the indie movies and such and check what the result there is. Hollywood blockbusters, like the five or six times before that they cried and at least one time swore under oath that something needs to be done or they're out of business, Hollywood blockbusters are doing just fine.